Fast forward to an ad-free future

Bleeding Edge's nomination for the 2004 King Canute Awards has to go to the Australian free-to-air television industry and specifically to Harold Mitchell, the foremost expert on media buying.

On last week's Inside Business program on ABC TV, Mitchell - who recently retired as boss of media buyers Mitchell & Partners - insisted that the personal video recorder did not represent a threat to the revenue stream of television networks because "people actually like to watch ads".

"I don't think people are going to want to use digital TV to do things like cutting out ads," Mitchell declared, with the certainty of Pope Urban VIII maintaining that the Earth was the centre of the universe.

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It was news to us, because we'd just spent a couple of hours watching ad-free commercial TV simply by hitting the "skip ad" button on our personal video recorder.

Mitchell seems unaware of the fact that every week 25,000 or so owners of set-top boxes such as the top-selling Topfield TF-5000PVR, and less powerful equivalents from manufacturers such as Strong and Thomson, are doing exactly the same thing.

Several hundred others are so keen on watching commercials that they have imported second-hand TiVo personal video recorders into Australia from Britain and the US and adapted them - a task that is not without complexity or expense - so they can skip them too.

Then there are 100 or so Linux experts who'd used the open source MythTV project's work to build their own super personal video recorder - with that handy skip ad button.

On top of that, there's a growing armada of devices such as the Elgato EyeTV, which allows owners of both Mac and PC notebook computers to record digital free-to-air TV via PCMCIA slots or USB, to say nothing of all those new desktops and laptops running Microsoft's new Windows Media Centre Edition, and the MythTV-based version, the Melbourne-built Home Media Centre from d1.com.au that we recently reviewed. You can bet they won't be showing too many commercials.

These devices are being adopted without fanfare by a rapidly growing number of Australians, despite the fact that the electronic program guides, which fostered explosive sales in the US of TiVo devices over the past five years, are not easily available here.

By next February, however, the Sydney-based ICE TV service, from a company called Faulconbridge (icetv.info), having finally settled $6 million in funding, is expected to start rolling out a service that, for $2 to $3 a week, will automatically integrate into devices such as the Topfield to allow one-button recording from an electronic program. It will automatically blank out ads and adjust for last-minute programming changes.

At that point, Mr Mitchell and the management of the Seven, Nine and Ten networks are going to discover that the universe of television viewers does not revolve around commercials.

The networks have been trying to hold back the tide by refusing to publish electronic programs that show any more than the current and the upcoming show, and threatening copyright action against anyone who does.

Peter Vogel, who came up with the ICE TV concept, saw exactly the same attitude to his first invention, the Fairlight music computer. When it hit the market, the industry claimed it would kill live music. Members of the musicians' union refused to perform in any studio that used a Fairlight.

But it didn't stop computerised music samplers transforming their industry.

Skipping ads isn't the driver for the revolution that will transform the nature of commercial television and change the viewing patterns of Australians.

The real impetus is the ability, through "time-shifting", to stop commercial stations dictating when viewers can watch their choice of shows. But the fact that it means viewers will no longer be forced to watch commercials - a particularly galling limitation when you're paying a substantial monthly subscription for Foxtel - is a distinct bonus.

In a recent interview, the chief executive of TiVo, Mike Ramsay, described the roots of the cult phenomenon that the personal video recorder has become in the US and will quickly become here; it has to do with the fact that people are discovering that they can be in control of television and, more broadly, of their home entertainment.

It's not until you discover what you can do that you realise how much a slave you were to the old way.

Peter Vogel puts it this way: "Where it changes your life most dramatically is when the kids come home. They can't use TV as an excuse for running their lives any more. They can't say, 'I'll do my homework when the Simpsons are over.' They can hit the pause button . . . and when they come home they can hit play and be back where they left off. And they see programs they might never otherwise have been able to watch."

Bleeding Edge has never been able to synchronise our activities with the schedule of The Sopranos, The West Wing, Sunday, Four Corners, Media Watch, Insiders and all the programs we would have liked to watch but never had the time or patience to program into the VCR or the Strong set-top box.

But the fact that we now have access to a local electronic program guide - they're out there on the web - means that we can watch whatever we like, whenever it suits us. Which is how we came to be watching Harold Mitchell in what was probably the comedy of the year. We enjoyed it so much, we replayed it several times.